


On Trebuchets and Broken Families

by notbeloved07



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Genius children, Hints of child neglect, Kid!fic in a flashback, M/M, References to Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 21:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbeloved07/pseuds/notbeloved07
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bruce was five, after a particularly brutal attack by his father, his mother brought him to one of the Maria Stark Foundation's shelters for victims of domestic violence. At the day-care centre there, he met a boy who dared to talk about the scientific method as it applies to fairy tales, who could go toe-to-toe with him on building anything from trebuchets to radios, and--most importantly--who never, ever saw him as a freak or a monster.</p><p>Unfortunately, his mother went back to his father and Bruce never saw his friend again. Still, he cherished those few days at the shelter as the best of his childhood and never forgot the boy he met there, whom he considered to be his first friend.</p><p>Several decades later, after the events of The Avengers, Bruce comes across an old photograph tucked inside a dusty engineering handbook in Stark Tower--a photograph of a boy who is unmistakeably the boy from the shelter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Trebuchets and Broken Families

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/16019.html?thread=36002451), which asked for Bruce and Tony having met as children in a shelter for victims of domestic violence.

There were children fidgeting all around him, but Bruce sat quietly towards the back and kept his eyes on the caretaker, Miss Mandy. She was reading some silly princess story, holding it out for the children to see. If he pretended that the story made some amount of sense, maybe they would think he was a normal child. Maybe they wouldn't realise he was a monster and make him go back to his father. He touched the bruises on his neck before dropping his right hand to hold the cast on his left wrist.

"The Princess and the Pea," Miss Mandy read. "There was once a prince, and he wanted to marry a princess. He travelled around the world to find one, but there was always something not quite right about them. So he came home again, very sad because he wanted a real princess so badly."

"Why would he care that much?" A dark haired boy in a button-down shirt asked in a crisp English accent.

"Please raise your hand, Anthony."

The boy raised his hand.

"Yes, Anthony?" Miss Mandy said.

"The only reason to marry a princess is for an alliance with her kingdom, but then he should care about where she's from, not just that she's a princess."

Bruce tensed in fear. The other boy could not have been older than he was, and children that young weren't supposed to think that much. Bruce averted his eyes. He didn't know if Miss Mandy would yell at the boy, or hit him, or--

"That is a good point," Miss Mandy said. "But sometimes princes didn't understand things like that."

Bruce looked back up and saw that Miss Mandy was smiling patiently at the boy, whose name must be Anthony. _Oh._ Bruce hadn't expected that.

Miss Mandy looked back at the story book. "One night, there was a terrible storm. In the middle of it, somebody knocked on the palace gates. It was a princess in a terrible state. The water streamed out of her hair and clothes, but she said she was a real princess."

In his peripheral vision, Bruce saw Anthony roll his eyes at that. Bruce wondered how long it would take the boy to wear down Miss Mandy's patience.

"'We shall see about that,' thought the old Queen," Miss Mandy read. "She went into the bedroom and laid a pea on the bedstead. Then, she took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the pea. This was where the princess was to sleep."

Anthony raised his hand again.

"Yes?" Miss Mandy looked to him.

"Wouldn't a pea get flattened by twenty mattresses?" Anthony asked. He pronounced the 't's in 'flattened' and 'twenty' in a clipped way that Bruce had only ever heard when listening to British royalty talk on the radio. Bruce tried not to stare.

"It was frozen," Miss Mandy replied.

"And stayed frozen all night?" Anthony looked like he was trying to raise one eyebrow, but couldn't quite manage it.

"I don't know," Miss Mandy said, slightly exasperated. She was hiding it well, but Bruce was very good at telling when someone was getting annoyed. "The bedstead was refrigerated or something. Now please stop interrupting the story."

Miss Mandy went back to reading. "In the morning the Queen asked her how she slept. 'Terribly!' said the princess. 'I hardly closed my eyes the whole night! I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and I'm all black and blue this morning.'"

Bruce resisted the urge to roll his own eyes at that. Someone who turned black and blue from a pea under twenty mattresses probably had a severe blood clotting disorder--most likely haemophilia given her claim to royalty, but since haemophilia was X-chromosomal recessive, all her sons would likely inherit it. Hardly a desirable trait in a bride.

"And then the Queen saw that the girl must be a real princess, because she could feel the pea through twenty mattresses," Miss Mandy continued reading.

 _She forgot the control trial,_ Bruce thought to himself, remembering a book he had skimmed about the scientific method. _And it's not even double-blind._

"She forgot the control trial," Anthony said out loud. "And didn't even fully blind the test trial."

Bruce sucked in a breath despite himself, trying not to think about how badly his father would beat him if Bruce had said something like that in front of him. He would have taken it as a sure sign that Bruce was a monster. For Anthony's sake, Bruce hoped that Miss Mandy wouldn't do the same.

"Sorry?" Miss Mandy asked. She was looking more and more annoyed.

"The Queen forgot to control for the other variables," Anthony said.

"Anthony, please--" Miss Mandy started.

"Variables like the mattresses and the foreign palace," Bruce heard himself saying before he had a chance to stop himself. His stomach dropped when he realised what he had just done. Still, since he had already started, he may as well continue. "They should run another trial, where she still sleeps on twenty mattresses, but without the pea."

"Boys--" Miss Mandy said, but Bruce was not paying attention to her. In his peripheral vision, Bruce saw Anthony turn to him and grin the way the children on TV did when they were opening Christmas presents.

He smiled shyly back at Anthony. If they were in trouble, at least they were in it together.

"Do you think they'd need to control for the stormy night, too?" Anthony asked Bruce.

"Hm..." Bruce thought about it. "Maybe they should run a series of trials and randomly choose whether to put a pea each night. But then the trials would not be independent; how she sleeps one night would affect how she sleeps the next. Like if she's extra tired."

Anthony nodded. "It's tricky because there's only one test subject. Maybe if they--"

"Story time is over," Miss Mandy interrupted, speaking over whatever Anthony was saying.

Bruce startled and wanted to avert his eyes again, but forced himself to look at Miss Mandy. He was afraid, but knew he needed to calm himself and be brave like Anthony was.

"You can go play in the blocks corner, the drawing area, the crafts area, or the board-games corner," Miss Mandy continued. Then, her voice softened as she added: "Or you could stay around here and keep talking about the scientific method as it applies to fairy tales."

"It's okay, Bruce," Miss Mandy said gently to Bruce after the other children scattered. "Nobody should ever get angry with you for liking science. Even if I would prefer if you two didn't disrupt the class, I would never be upset at you for thinking differently, okay?"

Bruce nodded. Miss Mandy smiled, and went to check on the other children.

"What was that about?" Anthony asked, frowning.

"Nothing. Anyway, like you said, the experiment was also only single-blind," Bruce said to distract him. "The Queen could have been giving hints with her tone."

"True," Anthony agreed. "I would have had my butler ask the princess how she slept."

"What's a butler?"

"Someone who takes care of you."

Bruce looked at Anthony blankly.

"You know, makes sure you're dressed in the morning, takes you to the park, reads to you at night, that sort of thing?"

"You mean, like, your mom?"

"Your mum does that?" Anthony raised his eyebrows. "I only ever see mine when I've worn my butler out. Or Miss Mandy, when Jarvis takes a vacation day. And they are not easily worn out." 

"Oh," Bruce said, wondering if that was how Anthony had learned to be so disruptive. He decided not to ask. "Wanna go build something with blocks?" he asked instead.

"Of course not," Anthony smirked, grabbing Bruce's uninjured wrist and dragging him towards the craft area. "Why build targets when you could build weapons?"

As it turned out, Anthony wasn't joking about making weapons, and soon enough, Bruce found himself arguing with him about the plans for a trebuchet made of cardboard and string. They were still arguing about the coefficient of friction for the pivot when the day ended and Bruce followed his mother back to their bedsit at the shelter, still talking excitedly about his new friend and controlled experiments and their plans for a siege engine. 

Over the next few days, Bruce and Anthony finished constructing the trebuchet and moved on to making a radio using a diode from a broken microwave and a handset from an old telephone, and then they used the rest of the telephone to make a blue box. Jarvis, Anthony's butler, had returned to work by then, but Anthony went out to the Foundation Day-care anyway.

After their third day together, Jarvis took them out to test their weapon in an open field. When they made perfect shots with even their first tests, Anthony jumped onto Bruce and squeezed him in a tight hug. It hurt all the places where his bruises hadn't faded yet, but Bruce just laughed and hugged him back. For the first time ever, Bruce had a friend. It was the happiest he could ever remember being.

Like all good things, though, Bruce's stay at the refuge came to an end. His mother went back to his father, his world was plunged back into darkness, and his time with the English boy with the playful smirk and the habit of interrupting everything with logic and science faded into nothing but a distant memory--possibly even a dream.

 

********************************

 

More than three decades later, Bruce was standing in the Stark Tower library and flipping through a mechanical engineering data table when he found an old photograph being used as a bookmark. He distractedly glanced at the little boy in the picture and did a double take.

It was Anthony. The boy was wearing a blue t-shirt and his face was soiled with what looked like engine oil, but Bruce could not mistake those playful eyes and that unbridled smile anywhere. 

Before he knew what he was doing, Bruce had grabbed the photograph and let himself into Tony's lab.

"My favourite Lean Green Smashing Machine!" Tony said without looking up from his tablet. "What's up?"

"Do you know who this boy is?" Bruce asked, placing the photograph on the counter in front of Tony.

Tony looked at it, looked back to Bruce, and narrowed his eyes. "Why? Do you?"

"Just curious. I met him once, when I was five."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Well, this is definitely my father's old lab and he kept records, so I might be able to find him, but could you give me anything to go on?"

Bruce looked away. Perhaps if he wasn't making eye contact he could hide how much this meant to him.

"I met him at a shelter when I was five. He's my age. Name's Anthony. British--or, at least his family was. He argued with the caretaker about an experiment in a fairy tale. We made a trebuchet together. And a radio--we took apart a microwave for the diode. He was brave and brilliant and manic--even for a five-year-old. Is that enough to be going on?"

Bruce must have let some of his excitement into his voice, however, because then Tony smirked and asked "This means a lot to you, doesn't it?"

"Why? Gonna ask for a price?" Bruce raised an eyebrow.

Tony rolled his eyes.

Bruce sighed. He didn't normally talk about anything from his childhood, but he trusted Tony and finding this boy was important. "My father beat me and called me a monster for figuring out how to build a catapult. He would've killed me if my mother hadn't intervened. Then we went to the shelter and there was this kid my age who argued with the teacher about controlled experiments and built a trebuchet and a radio with me. So yes. Yes, it means a lot to me."

"I'm sorry," Tony said lightly.

Bruce looked up. His friend's eyes were wide in shock.

"It's fine."

"No. I meant I apologise."

Bruce furrowed his brow. "For what?"

"This kid is me. I used to have a British accent--from Jarvis. My butler, not the AI," Tony waved at the air.

Oh. Bruce opened and closed his mouth and was vaguely aware that he might have been doing a fish impression. But then Tony was talking again.

"I know, I know. I'm sorry I didn't say anything earlier. I just wanted to hear your take and possibly tease you for it later--I didn't think you were going to... whatever you just did."

"Um. Yeah," Bruce said. Eloquence was never his strong suit, but this was bad even for him.

"For what it's worth, it meant a lot to me, too." Tony said soberly.

Bruce huffed in disbelief.

This time, Tony was the one to look away before talking. "No, seriously. Not many people get me. It's true now and it was true back then. I was surrounded by fawning people and flashing cameras and I was so lonely, and then you were there and you thought like me, and you didn't think I was weird, or if you did, we were weird together and we built shit and we understood each other, so yeah, that meant something to me, too."

Tony paused in an obvious cue for Bruce to respond in some way, but Bruce was at a loss.

Tony winced. "That sounded like a trashy teen romance novel, didn't it? Ugh. I meant that in the least romance-novel-ish way possible."

Bruce laughed, breaking the tension. "I just unleashed a childhood sob story on you. I think you're allowed some trashy romance."

"True," Tony said, chuckling with him. "But still. Wanna build some targets? I don't exactly have wooden blocks on hand, but we might be able to make do."

"No blocks?" Bruce grimaced. "I guess we'll have to rough it."

"We can probably manage," Tony said, handing Bruce a tablet with his latest arc-reactor design, which could capture the energy from the gamma rays emitted from the Vb-353 outer core reaction that weren't already being used to catalyse the Vb-357 inner core reaction.

"Yeah, we'll manage," Bruce said absent-mindedly, attention already absorbed by calculations surrounding the possibility of photon containment using a vibranium-hybride based room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate.

And together, they just might.


End file.
